NeuroPulse! Working on the alpha.

I heard about Microsoft’s Imagine Cup (www.imaginecup.com), and me and a friend thought, “why not?”. So we picked up C++ and got down to it, and so far it’s been a really fun ride!

First the game idea, NeuroPulse. It’s an idea I had ages ago, but since we started thinking it through it’s changed a lot. You can think of it like a neural network simulator with an RTS built on top, or something like that. The basic idea is that there is an environment, and the way you do things is by working with the environment, and of course pushing the environment to do what you want it to do more. Nodes are the main objects in the game, where energy goes and they also emit pulses once their internal energy is over a certain threshold. Certain nodes have a reactor, so they constantly generate a small amount of energy. From this comes out a hopefully emergent behaviour of the whole system. You control nodes by building a hub on them. Around the hub you can build buildings that do stuff and modify incoming or outgoing pulses. The way you build on another node is by sending pulses with building instructions attached, to build a hub, and then afterwards you can just build more buildings easily. To capture an enemy node, you first need to overload the node, by sending lots and lots of energy. Each overload will damage all buildings on a node, until they’re destroyed, at which point you can send your build instructions to the node.

We’re using the Ogre3d engine for the display, and it has been a suuuper awesome ride with it! Really easy to set things up and get going, so we’re really happy with that. And now it’s all about tying in a GUI and some interaction with the whole system and stuff.